(2023-02-16) Celik Nineteen years ago last Saturday, KevinMarks & I introduced microformats

Tantek Celik: Nineteen years ago last Saturday, Kevin Marks & I introduced microformats at OReillyMedia ETech 2004, building on “semantic (x)html”. We named #microformats only after we had established a pattern of real world examples; even our talk proposal was named RealWorldSemantics, and provided examples in that broader theme.

A few observations with the benefit of years of experience since we proposed “microformats”:

One: Many microformats succeeded because we solved an existing problem, with existing complex solutions, by providing a drastically simpler solution. XFN instead of FOAF. rel=license instead of Creative Commons RDF in HTML comments.

Two: A few microformats succeeded because they solved existing problems... hCard from vCard. hCalendar from iCalendar.

Eventually for microformats2 vocabularies, we adopted a subset approach, looking for web publishing use-cases for each feature, making h-card smaller than hCard, and h-event smaller than hCalendar.

Three: Success in a search engine was not enough, and sometimes attracted more bad actors than good... hReview was adopted by Google which led to it being heavily spammed.

Four: Publishing alone is not a use-case. There must be multiple consuming code use-cases (beyond search) for a microformat to succeed longterm.